We Have More to Worry About with UKIP than Bongo-Bongo Land

In perhaps the most unsurprising ‘reveal’ in human history, a UKIP MEP was filmed using racist language to court votes. Serial offender Godfrey Bloom, in a criticism of foreign aid (which deserves criticism but for wholly opposite reasons to those expressed by Bloom) referred to states receiving such aid, presumably on the African continent as ‘bongo bongo land’. Bloom has defended himself claiming he doesn’t ‘do political correctness’. Unfortunately, he and his party don’t do human decency either. In short, we have more to worry about with UKIP than bongo-bongo land.

Breaking Ranks on all the Wrong Issues

Bloom and UKIP brand themselves as an alternative to the mainstream political parties. However, instead of distinguishing themselves with a searing critique of the economic policy, exciting new ideas about localism, or in fact any distinctive and fresh ideas – they make themselves distinct by being plainly spoken and unrepentant about their prejudices. This may well occur as a breath of fresh air for people with bigoted views, a chance to feel that they a free in this company to say the unsayable; but the fact that you can be openly racist will come as small comfort while you are still entirely shafted socially, politically and economically. UKIP are ‘breaking ranks’ on all the wrong issues. They are not an alternative, they are a side show.

Farage is Not Your Friend

The first alarm bell that should go off for anyone even considering voting UKIP on the ‘alternative’ ticket should be the party leader, Nigel Farage.

Farage styles himself as a man of the people, but the fact he drinks pints and chain smokes says little of the real man. Farage is anything but just ‘some bloke down the pub’.

Farage is a millionaire banker, from millionaire banking lineage – his father Guy Oscar Justus Farage was a stockbroker.

Farage didn’t work his way up from the bottom. He was educated at £10,000 a term private school Dulwich College. On leaving college he used his father’s contacts to become a commodities trader in the City. He is one of those suited, champagne quaffing, morally bankrupt traders that helped bring our economy to its knees. A vote for UKIP, is a vote to install another wealthy heir into Number 10.

Farage poses as the bloke next door, allowing wine soaked punters to cry on his shoulder about their concerns at the local pubs of the land. He then takes those concerns and uses them to pit the working classes against each other – the working poor against the non-working poor, the natives against the immigrants. Farage and his party take legitimate rage about bogus austerity, indistinguishable politicians, and a disenchantment with a system which seems to offer little to the average Brit – and he points it away from the source of the problem.

Farage is a con artist and a stooge and you’d have to be stupid, ignorant or truly desperate to waste your vote for him.

A closer look at the policies of his party reveal that many who have cast a vote for UKIP not only know little of the leader, but of the party either.

UKIP Have no New Ideas

UKIP describes itself as a libertarian party. UKIP, like the Tea Party in the US, seems to fundamentally misunderstand Libertarianism. Libertarianism is about the smallest possible amount of government, with a focus on personal liberty and devolved power. Both UKIP and the Tea Party, with their socially conservative attitudes, believe personal liberty extends only to people like them.

Immigration: UKIP would cap net immigration at 50,000 a year, this number would exclude work permits and students. Students (282,833) and work permits (147,385) made up 430,218 of the immigration numbers last year. That leaves only 78,190. So UKIP are actually talking about reducing immigration by 28,000 people a year. Hardly revolutionary.

UKIP rail against the poor terms and conditions of serving and retired members of the armed forces, and Britain’s declining military power. They make a vast range of promises around replacing Trident with “a new advanced stealthy cruise type missile”, priority healthcare for forces personnel, and all sorts of new kit, perks and housing, all on the 2010 military budget.

The UKIP policy platform is a messy series of un-evidenced, often contradictory sound bites – all sound and fury, signifying nothing.

UKIP are Omniphobic

It would be futile to highlight UKIP as homophobic, transphobic or xenophobic – they are omniphobic. They are appalled and terrified about pretty much everything which doesn’t look and sound like them. They appeal to the darker angels of our nature which seek out and magnify superficial differences, whilst overlooking the vastness of our common humanity.

In 2010, the party suspended its Chairman for London, Paul Wiffen, after he made the following racist rant on an internet forum.

“You Left-wing scum are all the same, wanting to hand our birth right to Romanian gypsies who beat their wives and children into begging and stealing money they can gamble with, Muslim nutters who want to kill us and put us all under medieval Sharia law, the same Africans who sold their Afro-Caribbean brothers into a slavery that Britain was the first to abolish.”

Recent discussions on the UKIP online member’s forum on homosexuality and gay marriage were particularly enlightening.

Former parliamentary candidate and branch chairman for Oxford, Dr Julia Gasper claimed “As for the links between homosexuality and paedophilia, there is so much evidence that even a full-length book could hardly do justice to the ­subject.”

UKIP member Jan Zolyniak posted:[1] “The evidence is quite clear that the percentage of homosexuals who molest children is very high and cannot be dismissed.”

Douglas Denny from the Bognor Regis branch in West Sussex wrote: “What irritates me is they (sic) way they and their leftie, neo-Commie followers seem to want to force the rest of us to consider them as normal.”

Vote UKIP, Get Tory

A vote for UKIP, is a vote for a party of scared, angry, hateful people. Worse, rather than being an alternative to the neoliberal mainstream, it actually permits them to push through their policies even more quickly by creating the culture of suspicion, envy and prejudice required. Each vote wasted on UKIP serves as an endorsement to the most hard-edged neoliberals that the public will accept immigrant bashing, poor bashing, welfare cuts and tax cuts on the wealthiest people and corporations.

The Racist Van trolling London’s poor, mixed ethnicity areas telling immigrants to go home or face arrest, the UK Border Agency stopping people of colour at commuter hubs and illegally demanding proof of citizenship, the constant reference to an immigration problem which does not exist – this is what UKIP open the door to. Meanwhile, the real issues that have us poor, unemployed, underemployed and our public services being eviscerated remain untouched. UKIP is largely sponsored by the same people as the Tory party and prominent Tory’s and UKIPers are already touting the idea of a future coalition- which would deliver the country into the hands of a hard right government in 2015. These people are not revolutionaries, they are reactionaries.

17 thoughts on “We Have More to Worry About with UKIP than Bongo-Bongo Land”

I agree with everything you say about UKIP, but how do you get people who have convinced themselves (or been convinced) that national revival is linked to stopping migration to change their minds? Migration has changed societies all over the world, disturbing peoples’s sense of identity and social and economic position. The main message has been “Get over it”, but some people are struggling with this. It makes them feel powerless and its then easy for the racist right to encourage people to see immigrants as the cause of all their powerlessness. It is much easier for people to accept that the country is having hard times due to the changes they can see than to accept that politicians are effectively owned by an international oligarchy that is more preoccupied with its internal scrabble for power than the impact its behaviour has on people and the planet.

Fine, I understand that you do not want to see immigrants scape goated and that is laudable since they are only doing what government policy permitted them to do. BUT to claim that there is no problem with immigration is a falsehood. One only has to speak to low paid workers to understand how they have been played off against Eastern European migrants who will accept lower wages and poorer conditions because either they dont have better options at home or they only intend to stay in the UK for a short time. It’s the logic of the extreme free market. And we know that this was understood during the New Labour years because current policy chief John Cruddas has lamented that the opening of the borders was a “21st century incomes policy…cultural liberalism and Treasury, free market liberalism.”

And as you say yourself, this is not an immigration problem, it is an issue of the economic system. Closing the borders wouldn’t make a bit of difference, they’d just find another way to exploit working people. So don’t like it? Challenge the system and withdraw all support for any political party endorsing it

Well said! I agree with you. there is a problem with immigration, legal and illegal. The lower paid workers face more competition for their jobs from foreign immigrants. I see this as an undermining of all that the unions have fought for over the last 150Years, certainly in Great Britain. It is part of the’ haves’ versus ‘have- nots’ battle that has been going on since the first con man met the first simpleton!

Interesting info about Farage! I think he is a right wing fanatic! All mentally stable people should steer clear of fanatics of any calling or denomination. they have lost the right to intellectual debate.